Kathrine Switzer's 1967 Run
On April 19, 1967, Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to run the Boston Marathon as a numbered, registered entrant, completing the race despite a confrontation with a race official that would become among the most recognizable moments in the history of American distance running. Her participation challenged the informal but firmly enforced exclusion of women from organized long-distance road racing, and the events of that day set in motion changes that would reshape marathon running on a national and international scale for decades to come.
History
The Boston Marathon, first held in 1897, was for most of its early history an event that women were not permitted to officially enter. The Boston Athletic Association (BAA), the organization responsible for administering the race, maintained an unofficial policy barring female competitors that reflected broader assumptions of the era about women's physical capabilities. Medical and cultural attitudes of the time suggested, without scientific basis, that women were physiologically unsuited to long-distance running. Marathon distances were considered potentially dangerous for female athletes, and no major marathon in the United States offered official entry to women.
Kathrine Switzer was a student at Syracuse University when she trained for and decided to enter the 1967 Boston Marathon. She registered under the name "K.V. Switzer," which did not indicate her gender, and received official bib number 261. She ran as part of a small group that included her coach and boyfriend. During the race, approximately four miles in, race co-director Jock Semple attempted to physically remove Switzer from the course. Photographs taken by a press photographer captured the confrontation in vivid detail, showing Semple grabbing at Switzer's bib number while her companions intervened to block him. The images were widely circulated and brought national and international attention to the question of whether women should be allowed to compete in marathon running.
Switzer completed the race that day, finishing the full distance despite the disruption. Her completion of the course was not merely a personal achievement; it served as a direct, public demonstration that the assumptions underlying the exclusion of women from marathon competition were unfounded. The photographs of the confrontation became iconic images in the history of women's sports, and they were reproduced in newspapers and magazines across the country and abroad in the days following the race.
Culture
The cultural significance of Switzer's 1967 run extends well beyond the sport of running itself. At a time when the women's rights movement in the United States was gaining renewed momentum, her participation in the Boston Marathon resonated with broader arguments about the right of women to participate equally in public life. The confrontation on the race course became a symbol of the institutional resistance that women faced when seeking access to spaces and opportunities that had long been reserved for men.
Boston, as a city, has a deep and complicated relationship with the history of the marathon that bears its name. The Boston Marathon is woven into the cultural fabric of the city in ways that few sporting events anywhere in the world can claim. Patriots' Day, the Massachusetts state holiday on which the race is run each year, is a civic occasion in Boston that draws hundreds of thousands of spectators to the streets of the city and its surrounding communities. The marathon's course passes through multiple neighborhoods and municipalities, making it a shared experience for a wide swath of the greater Boston area.[1]
The images from 1967 have continued to circulate in cultural memory. They have appeared in documentaries, books, museum exhibitions, and educational materials about women's history and the history of sport. The story of Switzer's run is taught in schools and referenced in discussions of Title IX and the broader struggle for gender equity in athletics. In Boston itself, the run is remembered as a formative event in the city's sports history, one that prompted the marathon's governing body and the sport's international administrators to reconsider policies that had no legitimate basis in physiology or fairness.
Attractions
The Boston Marathon course itself, which begins in Hopkinton, Massachusetts and concludes on Boylston Street in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, serves as a living historical artifact connected to the events of 1967. Visitors to Boston who are interested in the history of the marathon can trace portions of the course and encounter landmarks associated with the race's long history. The finish line on Boylston Street is marked each year and draws visitors year-round who come specifically to stand at a location that has been the site of so many significant moments in marathon history.
The Boston Athletic Association maintains a presence in the city and provides resources related to the history of the race, including its evolution toward inclusion. The BAA's headquarters and the broader network of institutions connected to the marathon offer context for understanding how the race has changed since 1967. The John Hancock Tower, a longtime sponsor of the Boston Marathon, is another landmark in the Back Bay neighborhood that is associated with the modern era of the race. The area around Boylston Street and Copley Square is dense with historical and cultural significance for anyone interested in the marathon's history.[2]
Notable Residents
Kathrine Switzer herself went on to become an advocate for women's distance running on a global scale. After her 1967 run, she continued competing and eventually worked to organize and promote women's marathon racing internationally. Her efforts contributed to the inclusion of the women's marathon as an official event at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, a landmark development in the history of women's athletics. Switzer has returned to run the Boston Marathon multiple times, including a widely noted return run in 2017, fifty years after her original 1967 entry, during which she wore her original bib number 261.
Jock Semple, the race co-director who attempted to remove Switzer from the 1967 race, was himself a notable figure in Boston Marathon history. A Scottish-born runner and trainer, Semple was deeply invested in the Boston Marathon as an institution and spent decades as one of its most dedicated administrators. His confrontation with Switzer in 1967 has defined much of how he is remembered historically, though his contributions to the organization and promotion of the race over many years are also part of the record. The relationship between Switzer and Semple is said to have eventually become cordial in later years, a fact that has been noted in various retrospective accounts of the 1967 race and its aftermath.
History of Policy Change
The events of 1967 did not immediately result in official policy changes, but they accelerated a process that was already beginning to unfold. In 1972, five years after Switzer's run, the Boston Athletic Association officially opened the Boston Marathon to women, allowing female runners to register and compete with official recognition. That same year, Nina Kuscsik became the first official women's champion of the Boston Marathon. The change came in the context of broader shifts in American law and culture, including the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibited sex discrimination in educational programs receiving federal funding and had significant implications for women's athletics at all levels.
The international governing body of track and field athletics, then known as the International Amateur Athletic Federation, had maintained rules that discouraged or prohibited women from competing in races longer than 800 meters. These rules were not based on scientific evidence about women's athletic capabilities, but reflected long-standing assumptions that persisted well into the twentieth century. The visibility of events like Switzer's 1967 Boston Marathon run helped build the case, both in public opinion and within sporting institutions, that such restrictions were without merit. The eventual inclusion of the women's marathon in the Olympic program in 1984 represented the formal culmination of decades of advocacy and demonstration.
In Boston specifically, the official recognition of women in the marathon has become a source of civic pride. The city and the BAA have in subsequent decades taken steps to acknowledge and commemorate the history of women's participation in the race, including Switzer's foundational role. The bib number 261 has become a symbol in women's running more broadly, adopted by a nonprofit organization founded by Switzer to promote women's running internationally.[3]